Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Sometime in the past three or four years a storm came across our land on the other side of the creek. I haven't been over there because it is all woods and I had no reason to explore it. This year while Mike was hunting he discovered all the trees blown over by the roots.

Even though they have been there for awhile the hearts of the trees are still solid and almost all are red oak which makes good firewood so we have decided to harvest what we can.

This has proven to be a job that could just keep going. I think I counted about 41 big trees down and several smaller ones. After cutting about 5 of the logs into firewood lengths we realized there was much more wood than we had thought and now it had to be split. I rented a splitter for the next days work.

Since we are in the middle of the woods, there are no roads, we had to cut a path to get the splitter in before we could split. This is another full days work and not half of what we have cut it split! And it is in the middle of the woods to be hauled out and stacked.

Red Oak is such a pretty fire wood. It burns hot and turns into a solid bed of coals. Altho the outside of the wood is beginning to get pethy (we really don't know how long it has been down) the center is beautiful.

Next step will be building a rack to hold the wood and hauling it our of the woods and stacking it.